DICE: PC Development Has Positive Trickle-Down Effect

In an interview with PC Gamer, EA/DICE executive producer Patrick Bach said that leading game development on the PC has a positive trickle-down effect for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Unfortunately, not everyone in the industry agrees, focusing solely on the console sector and ignoring PC gamers entirely due to concerns over "piracy" and "fragmentation." Still, it's good to hear a top publisher/developer stick up for the PC gaming sector as a leading platform despite all those in the business who have settled on consoles.

"Our biggest benefit for the console has been that we’re leading on PC," said Bach. "It has forced us to push the limited technology of consoles compared to the PC to a new level, because we set the bar with what we wanted to create on PC and said, 'How the heck are we going to do this on consoles?'"

He added that by developing primarily on the PC, DICE had to prioritize its decisions on what to toss out for the console versions. "The PC version can include things that are really cool but not key for the gaming experience," he said. "You know it’s easier for you to make those decisions when you have a robust PC build to look at, and the console versions look great because of the PC."

Bach also went on to talk about multiplayer and how a certain number of simultaneous players on one map could be overkill. "Games are about having fun, it’s not about doing the most you can do," he said. "If we can jump two meters it must be better to jump four meters. No. 64 players is kind of the maximum where it’s still fun and you can still control the Battlefield. It’s like I can understand where I got shot from and why."

Guess Battlefield 3 will never see more than 64 players in multiplayer at one time.

It's just a shame all of DICE's hard work gets overshadowed by the ORIGIN\EA product activation fiasco that has taken place with the launch of BF3 (activation services unavailable globally at the time of release with not reports on when they will be available).

I would like to play the game that I pre-ordered and received on the day of release so as to view the marvellous work of DICE but as I can't activate the game even to play the single-player campaign I will have to make do with admiring the screen-shots on the back of the game's case!

Yeah it would also be nice if they fixed the broken keybinding interface, perhaps then lefthanded players who make up 25% of the population, people with disability that need to use varied control methods and just those with long term learned key configurations could use the game as they wish and require to rather than the interface ruining their experience.